All liberals should memorise this film’s superb line, spoken by, all of people, Charlton Heston: “A policeman’s job is only easy in a police state!” Orson Welles’s brilliant 1958 noir melodrama Touch of Evil is now on rerelease. Adapted by Welles from Whit Masterson’s pulp thriller Badge of Evil, it had streaks of teen degradation and reefer madness, and the most intense interracial relationship since The Searchers.
Like much of Welles’s work, it was taken out of his hands by studio chiefs and re-edited without his approval, but has been restored as far as possible according to wishes he expressed in a long, anguished memo – especially in the removal of the credits that were superimposed on the famous opening tracking shot.
Welles gave one of his most Shakespearean performances as the ageing, corrupt police chief Captain Quinlan in a small US town right on the Mexico border. Charlton Heston plays Vargas, an idealistic Mexican cop who has just married Susan (Janet Leigh), a beautiful American blonde, to the titillated, censorious fascination of everyone around. Nettled by the uppity Vargas’s intermarrying and meddling, the crooked Quinlan decides to use the local drug gang to attack Susan at a remote hotel, and frame her as a supposed drug addict. To associate with Quinlan is to be touched, smeared, molested by pure evil. But poor Quinlan long ago resigned himself to his own petty corruption.
